Monday, February 09, 2015

The Final Resting Place Of Farmer Page's Horse

As has often been said, on this blog and elsewhere, one of the best things about geocaching is exploring areas that you would never discover on ones own.

I had a superb example of this on Saturday.  I was exploring Durham North Carolina with ncbiscuit and ILM Cachers.  One of the caches we ended up doing took us to a cemetery in the woods.

There is absolutely nothing to indicate there is a cemetery here. No roads, no paths, no signs, nothing.

The cemetery is actually for horses. Back in the early 1900s, Farmer Page buried his horses here.  Since then the woods have grown around the place.  The area is more built up now, with a housing development on one side, and an Interstate on the other. However in the middle of all that development remains hidden a fascinating piece of history.
The cache that is here is a multi cache.  The first stage is to get information from several of the gravestones and use that to calculate the coordinates.  There are 12-15 horses and mules buried here.

Pictured is one half of ILM Cachers grabbing some information from one of the stones.

I really like the fact that the head stones include the horses name, dates, descriptions of the horse, and how good of a horse they were.  Adds a lot of personality to the place. Apparently Dan was the best of all.
The final cache was really close by so it only took us a few minutes to complete this multi cache.  However it ranks among the favourite caches I've done in North Carolina, all because of the unique and interesting history.

Have you found a hidden historic location while geocaching?  Tell me about it in the comments below.

For that matter, do you have a horse you miss the most?  Tell me about that too.  This is the horse I miss the most: Lil' Sebastian